Young Lovinescu. A critic with a few ideas, but without a system presents a new point of view about the best regarded ”critical system” in Romanian culture. After delineating a few incongruities, the present study argues that Lovinescu did not actually change in spite of his confession. The amount of work submitted to his interpreters directed them to a evolutive reading pattern, whereas the real key of his conception is the permanent stasis and stagnation. In his criticism the psychological insight has the last word in the process of interpretation. Lovinescu mingles in the well-known „aesthetic mutation” formula a great amount of psychological understanding which corrupts the system from the inside.
Keywords: „aesthetic mutation”, theory of forms without content, imitation, synchronism, modernism, art for
art’s sake, art with a tendency, personality, temper, will